Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to exchange documents across many different computer platforms. A PDF file is self-contained, which means that the text, graphics, fonts, and other features used by the PDF file are all included within the PDF file. In printing systems, print jobs may be submitted as PDF files. For example, a PDF file may be used by a printing system to generate mail pieces, documents, books, etc. In production printing environments, each PDF file may be segmented into thousands of individual documents, where each document is a mail piece that is one or more pages long.
PDF is a useful printing format because it is self-contained. However, it is problematic to manipulate PDF data on a large scale within the print shop environment. For example, a user who has received an incoming PDF print job from a customer may manually edit the PDF print job on a page-by-page basis in order to meet a customer's demands (e.g., to alter printable content such as text or images within the PDF print data, etc.). However, this is a very time-consuming process. This problem is amplified when incoming PDF print jobs from a customer consistently require the same modifications before printing, because the incoming PDF data must be manually edited over and over again. Thus, it remains expensive and time-consuming to perform large-scale editing operations upon PDF print jobs that have already been received for printing at a printing system.